Europe sorts 13 countries into two AI gigafactory tiers, and Frontex buys €522m of surveillance

Europe names the countries in its €10bn AI gigafactory plan

European Union€10bnBids close 12 Nov

The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking opened tendering on 30 July for the consortia that will build and run Europe's AI gigafactories, at an estimated €10bn excluding VAT. The money splits into two lots: €4bn for medium-scale facilities, where up to four consortia will be chosen, and €6bn for large-scale ones, where up to three will be. Each contract runs 78 months, described in the notice as up to 18 months of construction and five years of operation. Tenders close at 16:00 CET on 12 November.

The structure is unusual for a purchase of this size. The Joint Undertaking is not buying buildings or chips. It is buying a guaranteed share of compute time from whoever builds them, acting as anchor customer rather than owner, and the Commission expects €10bn of public commitment to pull more than €20bn of private capital behind it.

The part that has not been reported sits in the places of performance, which differ by lot. The medium-scale lot names Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Latvia, Poland and Sweden. The large-scale lot names Germany, Spain, Greece, Italy and Portugal. That is a field of expectation rather than a list of winners, and the notice does not say how the ranked lists become awards or which sites are in play. It is still the first public document to sort the candidates into tiers.

The programme was announced in February 2025 as €20bn for four gigafactories. A call for expressions of interest closed that June with 76 responses across 16 member states. The formal call was promised for the end of 2025. It arrived seven months late, and for seven facilities rather than four. It is also the first notice in our database to use the word gigafactory.

Source: original notice

New Zealand starts testing the environment for bird flu

New ZealandValue not publishedBids close 28 Aug

The Ministry for Primary Industries published a tender on 30 July for services to develop and validate environmental RNA testing for avian influenza: collecting samples from bird habitats around the country, optimising the sampling and testing methods for New Zealand conditions, and writing a standard operating procedure the ministry's Animal Health Laboratory can adopt. The technique looks for viral genetic material left in water, sediment and surfaces rather than in captured birds.

Fifteen days earlier, on 15 July, a brown skua found on Petone Beach near Wellington returned the country's first confirmed positive test for H5 bird flu. There have been no further detections since 17 July and none in poultry, and the Department of Conservation has begun vaccinating breeding populations of five threatened native species. Australia recorded its first case in June. The notice does not mention any of this, and publishes no value.

It is the first notice in our database to procure environmental RNA testing of any kind.

Source: original notice

Frontex puts €522.6m into eyes over the sea

European Union€522.6m frameworkBids close 10 Aug

The European Border and Coast Guard Agency wants crewed fixed-wing aircraft for maritime surveillance under a four-year framework worth €522.6m excluding VAT, with up to six suppliers competing mission by mission. The specification is exact: two flights a day, an X-band radar tracking at least 500 simultaneous targets, and video streamed to a Frontex coordination centre over satellite. Missions may be flown over the waters and territory of countries outside the EU. Contractors must also be able to drop life rafts for thirty people and carry on with the mission rather than land.

The sum is the story. Frontex's earlier aerial surveillance contracts ran to about €14.5m per supplier, and the agency awarded roughly €84.5m of such work in 2021. This framework is around twenty times any other Frontex notice in our data. The notice in our window is a corrigendum moving the closing date to 10 August.

Greece was buying in the same week: €20m, rising to €34.8m with options, for coastguard drones, three-quarters funded by the EU's border management instrument.

Sources: Frontex notice · Hellenic Coast Guard notice · Greek title translated (machine-assisted)

NATO shops for a way to read its own encrypted traffic

NATOValue not publishedResponses close 19 Aug

The NATO Communications and Information Agency told American industry, in a US Commerce Department notice published on 27 July, that it will tender for a centrally managed system to intercept, inspect and analyse encrypted traffic across its networks. The notice quantifies the job: about 100 interfaces where systems already sit, some 40 deployments of the new component, and infrastructure spanning every NATO nation. The certificates it will use are to be supplied by NATO.

That last detail settles what this is. The technique is break-and-inspect: an organisation decrypts traffic at its own gateway using certificates its own machines already trust, scans it, then re-encrypts it. It works only on networks the organisation controls, and the agency's title for it is more alarming than the thing itself. America's National Security Agency warned in 2019 that such an inspection point becomes a high-value target and should exist once, centrally. That is what is being asked for.

No value is published. Bidders need clearance at secret or above; award is estimated for January 2027.

Source: original notice

Eight German authorities are buying body armour, and none of them say why

Germany€13m for one frameworkRequests close 24 Aug

Schleswig-Holstein's state police tendered a €13m framework on 24 July for modular ballistic vest systems, to be built to a new national technical guideline for protective vests dated 1 June 2026, with three or four suppliers to be shortlisted. It is the eighth German public body to tender ballistic vests since mid-May: Baden-Württemberg, Lower Saxony, Saarland, North Rhine-Westphalia, Berlin, the federal customs administration and the Federal Office for Logistics and Mobility have all done the same, fourteen notices between them in ten weeks.

Our database holds no German protective-vest notice at all between the start of our records on 30 January and 14 May. The Schleswig-Holstein notice is the only one of the fourteen that names the new guideline. None of them explains the timing, and a new specification issued on 1 June would be the ordinary explanation for a re-equipment wave. Procurement, as often, arrives before the announcement.

Source: original notice · title translated from German (machine-assisted)

The Dominican Republic puts DOP 8.4bn behind the electricity it never billed

Dominican RepublicDOP 8.39bn (≈€125m)Bids close 11 Sep

Empresa Distribuidora de Electricidad del Este, the state distributor serving the east of the country, is tendering technical management brigades for commercial management and loss management, at an estimated DOP 8,389,776,317.80 over 36 months. It is the second-largest notice anywhere in the week's data, split across 41 lots by service zone and by function. The brigades inspect for fraud, normalise meters and dismantle illegal connections.

Losses here mean two things: energy delivered but never billed, and energy billed but never collected. EdeEste carries the worst figures of the three distributors, losing about 56% in the first quarter of 2026, up from 54.4% a year earlier. The state carries the difference. Transfers to cover distributor deficits reached DOP 58.8bn in the first five and a half months of the year, equal to 80.7% of the central government's deficit.

The headline sum is calmer than it looks. It merges two contracts expiring through 2027, and works out at about DOP 233m a month against DOP 227m for the pair it replaces: in real terms, a cut.

Source: original notice · title translated from Spanish (machine-assisted)

Paris re-tenders a racecourse concession it already signed

France€400m over 30 yearsBids close 5 Oct

The city of Paris advertised a concession on 24 July for the Paris-Vincennes racecourse, 48 hectares in the Bois de Vincennes staging harness racing since 1863, for 30 years from 1 April 2027. The €400m is not money the city spends but the concessionaire's estimated turnover over the term; Paris finances none of the investment and collects at least €2m a year plus a share of revenue. Under the convention signed in 1976, the racecourse paid the city €101,832 in 2024.

Paris has run this competition before. A 2023 attempt drew one admissible bid, from the incumbent, offering €2m a year against a document requiring €5m. The city marked it down on that criterion and approved it anyway in July 2025. The prefect went to court; the contract was signed before the appeal could be heard, which made it moot. Trade press reported this July that he later won on the merits, obtaining termination from March 2027.

The new concession sets its minimum fee at €2m: the figure the litigation was about. We could not obtain the judgment.

Source: original notice · title translated from French (machine-assisted)

French hospitals put €10m behind rats, insects and pigeons

France€10m frameworkBids close 3 Aug

Resah, the purchasing central that buys on behalf of more than four thousand French hospitals, care homes, fire services and local authorities, tendered a framework on 27 July for what the trade calls 4D services: dératisation, désinsectisation, désinfection and dépigeonnisation. Rats, insects, disinfection and pigeons.

The framework totals €10m across three lots, valued at €7.5m, €1.5m and €1m; the notice does not say which services fall in which lot. Pigeon clearance is a discipline with its own name, its own suppliers and, here, its own syllable in a national hospital framework. Bids close on 3 August, a week after publication.

Source: original notice · title translated from French (machine-assisted)

The Spanish Royal Household buys a bug-sweeping kit in two suitcases

Spain€28,500Bids close 11 Aug

The interior ministry tendered countermeasures equipment on 27 July for the security service of the Royal Household, the unit of national police and Guardia Civil officers that has protected the royal family since 1979. The estimated value is €28,500 before tax, under the abbreviated procedure Spain reserves for small purchases, with delivery to a barracks at El Pardo.

The specification is unusually legible for a security contract. Two portable cases are required. One holds inspection tools: a borescope, a wall scanner, a laser measure, a night-vision monocular and a torch that switches between white and ultraviolet light. The other holds a portable spectrum analyser covering 10 kHz to 6 GHz and an audio amplifier for probing cabling. The ministry says the kit is for locating unauthorised radio transmissions and technical espionage devices, and for sweeping offices, meeting rooms, vehicles and temporary accommodation.

It is filed, in the European classification, under electronic intelligence systems. It is two suitcases for finding hidden microphones, and it costs less than a mid-range car.

Source: original notice · title and specification translated from Spanish (machine-assisted)